September 07, 2004

Arab World Reacts to Beslan Massacre

MEMRI has the full report on the Arab reaction, some of full condemnation and some of it a kind of half-hearted argument that this is bad because it hurts Islam. But here are the hightlights along with my thoughts:

is a group of criminal murderers, and everyone responsible for this crime must be hunted down and brought to trial in an international court. The time has come for everyone to accept as a first principle the sanctity of life and [the obligation] to avoid harming civiliansâ€¦"

An international court? Am I being paranoid or is this a swipe at the US? If it is not, then the premise is still wrong. This is war, not some global court of law where we send out the Army to serve subpoenas.

[Past] terrorist actions in the world have only done damage to the causes of the peoples [involved] and furnished a moral pretext to the forces of evil and to the aggressors to subjugate peoples and countries and to destroy themâ€¦ The occupation of Palestine, Chechnya, and Iraq are an evil that demands resistance, but the difference between resistance and terror is great and the confusion [of the two] serves [the interest] of the occupiers."

So, this is bad, mmm-kay but more so because it gives the even worse Yankee Imperialists an excuse to oppress....

" Obviously not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims. The kidnappers of the students in Ossetia are Muslims. The kidnappers and killers of the Nepalese workers and cooks are also Muslims. Those who rape and murder in Darfour are Muslims, and their victims are Muslims as well. Those who blew up the residential complexes in Riyadh and Al-Khobar are Muslims. Those who kidnapped the two French journalists are Muslims. The two [women] who blew up the two planes [over Russia] a week ago are Muslims. Bin Laden is a Muslim and Al-Houthi [the head of a terrorist group in Yemen] is a Muslim. The majority of those who carried out suicide operations against buses, schools, houses, and buildings around the world in the last ten years are also Muslims.

"What a terrible record. Does this not say something about us, about our society and our culture? If we put all of these pictures together in one day, we will see that these pictures are difficult, embarrassing, and humiliating for us. However, instead of avoiding them and justifying them it is incumbent upon us first of all to recognize their authenticity rather than to compose eloquent articles and speeches proclaiming our innocenceâ€¦

Yes, it says something about you. Jesus said, "By their fruits ye shall know them." And that's not just some theologic statement, it's stating the obvious. Bad people are bad because they do bad things.

The propagandists of Jihad succeeded in the span of a few years in distorting the image of Islam, while the enemies of Islam did not succeed in doing this [even] in the course of hundreds of years. They turned today's Islam into something having to do with decapitations, the slashing of throats, abducting innocent civilians and exploding people. They have fixed the image of Muslims in the eyes of the world as barbarians and savages who are not good for anything except slaughtering peopleâ€¦

Does the word irony even begin to remotely describe the fact that the above quote comes out of a Saudi government daily newspaper? Unless the Saudis have decided to do away with decapitation for such horrible crimes as sodomy since the last time I checked.

The money quote, though, comes from a liberal Muslim blogger, who gets it right but I have the feeling he's about to get a fatwa laid on his ass:

'The Arabs and the Muslims Today Contribute Nothing to Civilization and Progress Except for Blood, Severed Heads, Scorched Bodies, and the Abduction and Murder of Children'

I love this one next one:

These savages are not Muslims but rather â€¦ enemies of Islam. Their goal is to distort the image of the Islamic religion, to cause damage to Muslims, to slow the spread of Islam and to turn it into a hated pariah religion which the entire world opposesâ€¦there is a true Islam and then there are those who stray from it and they are more dangerous than the Jews."

No, their goal is a world-wide Islamic state, is that something you reject too? If not, than are you only rejecting the means and not the ends? And what of the ends, aren't the ends just as horrible as the means? A state ruled by religious fanatics who would make Christians and Jews second-class citizens? A state that would outlaw atheism and polytheism? Is not that state just as intolerable and cruel as the ones the Chechen terrorists envision? I'm sorry, you must want a kinder-gentler kind of theocratic fascism.

There's more, some quite good and a relief to hear from the Muslim world, some half-hearted with the ever present blame the J-O-Os or Americans in the background. Go read it.